by Joe Hill
“Go back. She passed you on the stairs. She had a gun. Then what?”
“I turned to watch her go. I might even have started to walk after her. To see if she was— Ow!”
His girlfriend had punched him in the shoulder. “You ass. She had a gun, O.K.!” She hit him a second time.
He rubbed his shoulder, and when he spoke again, it was as much to Sarah as to Lanternglass. “I didn’t follow too close. She left me behind anyway. After a moment I began thinking I ought to find someone in security. I had just started back down the steps when I heard Mr. Lewis shout and then a gun popping off. I got down flat on the stairs and froze. Then I heard Mr. Kellaway yelling—he’s the head of mall security—and more shots.”
“Do you remember how many?”
Okello closed one eye, looked into the sky with the other. “Three at first. That was when she killed Roger Lewis. About a minute after that, another shot and a sound like something falling over, then a fifth shot. And about five minutes later, two more.”
“You sure about that? Five whole minutes between the fifth shot and the last two? In a stressful incident, it’s pretty easy to lose track of time.”
He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Four, five minutes. I know because I was texting with Sarah, so I could see the time on my phone.”
Lanternglass nodded but doubted him. Eyewitnesses reshaped memories into stories very rapidly, and stories were always at least partly make-believe, dramatic interpretations of half-recalled facts.
Okello shrugged again. “That was it. I stayed put, and a couple minutes later the police charged up the stairs in their armor, carrying machine guns, ready to fight off ISIS. Only impact they made was on my hand. One of them stepped on it running by.” He paused, then shook his head. “You can leave that part out, too. They went in to save lives. For all they knew, they might’ve been about to face a hail of gunfire. I don’t want to put them down. EMTs had a look at my hand while I made a statement. No bones broke.”
“And you’re out and you’re O.K.,” Sarah said, and stretched up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “And don’t you dare say it or I’ma twist your nipple.”
Okello grinned, and his lips found hers, and in spite of herself Lanternglass decided OOHYUM was all right.
“Don’t say what?” Lanternglass asked.
“That he’s always O.K.,” Sarah said, and rolled her eyes. “Him and his stupid dad jokes.”
“I’m even more O.K. than usual. I mean, I’m not okay a baby got killed—”
“A baby?” Lanternglass asked.
His eyelids lowered, and a sudden scared, unhappy look crossed his face. “Yes, ma’am. Shot with his mom. A woman in a hijab, her baby, a chubby dude, and Mr. Lewis. Those are the four casualties, everyone who died—not counting the shooter. But you think about some of what’s happened in other places, like Aurora and Columbine, and I’m glad it wasn’t worse. I’m sure the cops are glad they didn’t have to shoot it out with anyone.” He laughed then—a harsh, jarring sound that carried no real humor in it. “And I bet Mr. Kellaway is glad he finally got to shoot someone.”
Lanternglass was thinking she ought to wrap it up, get a couple quotes from the girls she wasn’t going to use and split. If she didn’t get moving soon, she’d be late to pick her daughter up from camp. She still recalled, keenly, the sick and lonesome feeling of being the last to go home, staring out the rain-speckled windows of her modern-dance class, wondering if someone, anyone, would turn up to get her. But there was no walking away from that last line, which grabbed her attention and held it.
“What do you mean, he’s probably glad he finally got to shoot someone?”
The almost hungry grin on Okello’s face slipped away. “Ah, maybe you better leave that out, too.”
She paused the recording. “I won’t print anything that makes trouble for you here, Okello. I’m just curious. What’s the story with Kellaway?”
Okello met her stare with a sudden chill in his own Mississippi-colored eyes. “Old Nazi bastard put a gun in my neck on my third day of work.”
“He . . . what?”
“Mr. Boston, the floor manager at Boost Yer Game, he asked if I could use my car to run some merch down to Daytona Beach. I was doing a bunch of errands because I didn’t have my uniform yet.” Tugging at the silly gold basketball shirt that bore the words BOOST YER GAME and showed a black hand gripping an orange ball of flame. “I was out here sticking boxes in the back of my car when Kellaway sneaks up behind me and sticks the barrel of a gun against my neck. He says, ‘Jail or the morgue—it’s up to you. It’s the same to me either way.’”
“Bullshit,” Lanternglass said, although she believed him, and her tone said she believed him.
Sarah’s jaw was set, her mouth a grim line, and she was squeezing her boyfriend’s fingers tightly. She’d heard this story already, Lanternglass could tell.
“Hand on my heart,” Okello said, and tapped his fingers against his chest. “He got on the radio, said he had someone lifting boxes off the loading dock behind Boost Yer Game. Said I had a box cutter and a gun, too. But before his office radioed the cops, Mr. Boston saw what was happening and came running out to tell him it was all right. That I was an employee.”
“You had a gun?”
“I had a tape gun,” Okello said. “To seal a couple of boxes. The handle was jutting out of the pocket of my hoodie. He was right on the box cutter, though. That was in the back of my pants.”
The suspect rose, and I saw a flash in his hand. He leapt. I thought he was coming for me with a knife, and I fired my weapon to defend myself—that was what Officer Mooney had said when he was deposed before a grand jury. Lanternglass had read the entire statement years later. All it took to turn a CD into a knife or a tape gun into a .45 was a little imagination, a little panic, and a lot of prejudice.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” Lanternglass said. “Why didn’t he get fired?”
One corner of Okello’s mouth turned up in that movie-star grin of his, although there was a certain cynicism in it now that disheartened her. “Mr. Boston had the shakes for an hour. He was so pale he looked like he had the flu. He said he was going to call the complaint line for the firm that runs mall security, but when he tried, it was disconnected. He wrote them an e-mail and it bounced back as undeliverable. They’re a big southern outfit—Falcon Security? They provide the men for a lot of shopping centers. You’d think it’d be easier to get in touch with them. Mr. Boston asked if I wanted to go to the cops and file a complaint, but I figured nothing would happen, so I said skip it.”
“Why didn’t you quit?”
“ ’Cause I can’t pay for college with my good looks.”
“Did Kellaway apologize?”
“Yep. On the scene and then again the next day, in his office. He gave me a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate good at any shop in the mall.”
“Holy shit. That was big of him. Twenty-five whole dollars. What’d you spend it on?”
“Still got it,” Okello said. “I’m going to hold on to it until someone in the mall starts selling discount bulletproof vests. I’m in the market for one.”
5:15 P.M.
Lanternglass watched the press conference on TV with Dorothy.
Dorothy was on her knees in front of the television, about a foot from the screen, where she liked it best. Eight-year-old black girl with a long neck and mile-long legs, wearing a hot-pink cap with rabbit ears. She was going through a hat phase, had a drawerful of them. Getting her out of the house in the morning was a daily anguish; it could take her upward of twenty minutes to find the perfect hat for the day.
“I’m missing Kim Possible,” Dorothy said, referring to her favorite Disney Channel series.
The local news had just cut to an unnamed conference room, with the promise that the St. Possenti police were about to address the shooting at the Miracle Falls Mall and perhaps identify the heroic security guard who had stopped the killer before the rampage could go wi
de.
“Mama’s got to see this for work,” Lanternglass said from the kitchen table, where she was on her laptop banging out two thousand words on the Ocala fire. It wasn’t hard to get in the right mind-set. She could smell the smoke right there in her living room, even with the blaze miles away. She wondered if the wind was shifting.
“I want a job where I get to watch TV and ride around in helicopters.”
“Next time you see Mr. Chen, you can ask if he’s hiring. This household could use another source of income.” There wasn’t going to be any bread coming from Dorothy’s father. He’d been out of the picture almost since Dorothy was born, wasn’t going to let a baby fuck up his music career. Last Lanternglass had heard, he was up in New York, in Queens, had two daughters by another woman, and his music career consisted of drumming on white plastic tubs in Times Square for dollars in the hat.
Cameras flashed. There was a rustling, like the wind stirring in leafy trees, the sound of an unseen audience murmuring and settling. Chief Jay Rickles and the slim Cuban D.A. took seats behind a folding table arrayed with microphones. They were followed by a third man in a baggy hoodie that said SEAWORLD and showed a jumping killer whale. This third man was in his forties, guy with a graying mustache and a military haircut. He had the thick neck of a marine or a boxer and big, bony hands, and he regarded the cameras with oddly colorless, indifferent eyes.
Chief Jay Rickles waited for everyone to quiet down and then waited some more, because he enjoyed a long, dramatic silence. Dorothy hopped a little closer to the TV.
“That’s too close, Button,” Lanternglass said.
“I like to get right up next to the screen so I can see if anyone is lying.”
“Your hat is blocking my view.”
Dorothy crept back an imperceptible centimeter.
“Hello and good evening,” Rickles began. “I’m Chief Jay Rickles, and I’m going to open with a brief statement, summarizing the events of this morning at the Miracle Falls Mall. At approximately ten-thirty A.M., a shooting occurred in Devotion Diamonds, on the second floor. We have now positively identified the shooter as Rebecca Kolbert, twenty, of St. Possenti, who was a salesgirl at the store. We believe that Ms. Kolbert entered the store, where she shot Roger Lewis, forty-seven, the manager of the Devotion Diamonds retail chain, Yasmin Haswar, a customer, and Yasmin’s infant son, Ibrahim. At that point Ms. Kolbert was confronted by Randall Kellaway, the head of security at the mall, an officer with Falcon Security, and a former military policeman in the U.S. Army.” At this, Rickles leaned forward and aimed an admiring glance down the length of the table toward the big man in the hoodie. “Mr. Kellaway instructed Ms. Kolbert to put down her firearm. Instead she raised her gun to fire, and at that point he shot her. Believing he had killed her, he hurried to Mrs. Haswar to offer medical aid. Another man, Robert Lutz, entered the store to try to offer his assistance, and he was shot by Ms. Kolbert. At that point Mr. Kellaway disarmed the shooter. Shortly afterward SWAT and emergency personnel swarmed the scene. Ms. Kolbert was pronounced dead at eleven-sixteen A.M.” His hands were folded together in front of him. Rickles had the serene look of a man admiring a sunset while he sat on his porch with a can of beer. “Some of you are already aware that my daughter and her two children were in the mall at the time of the incident. There is no reason to believe they were ever in physical danger. There is also no reason to believe they weren’t. Ms. Kolbert was indiscriminate in claiming innocent life, and we cannot be certain what her final intentions might have been. Certainly she was intent on killing to her last breath. I don’t like to think about what might have happened if Mr. Kellaway had not responded with such swift and decisive action. Have no doubt: This was an unspeakable tragedy. In the space of a few minutes, we lost a beloved local employer, an innocent bystander who’d entered the store in an act of fearless compassion, a mother, and her infant. Her infant. A beautiful baby boy who was a part of St. Possenti’s patriotic Muslim community. We’ll be unpacking our anguish for days and weeks and months to come. But today we found out what happens when a bad guy with a gun meets a good guy with a gun. Today our grief is counterbalanced by our gratitude, our pain abides alongside our pride.” He paused, leaned forward, looked at the assistant D.A. “Mr. Lopez? Would you care to add anything at this time?”
“Why would anyone shoot a baby?” Dorothy asked. “Did that really happen?”
Lanternglass said, “That really happened, Button.”
“I think that’s stupid.”
“Me, too.”
On the TV, Lopez leaned forward and said, “The Flagler County district attorney’s office has committed our entire resources, including two full-time investigators, to determine the motive behind today’s heinous and tragic acts and to learn whether Ms. Kolbert acted alone or had the support of any confederates.” He spoke for another half a minute, reciting boilerplate: if anyone had any further information, blah, blah, no charges filed at this time, blah, blah, state-of-the-art forensics, yada, yada. Then he was done, and Rickles leaned forward again.
“Rand? Would you like to make a statement?” he asked, peering down the length of the table at the big man in the SeaWorld hoodie.
A fresh round of camera flashes strafed the room.
Kellaway sat with his hands in his lap and his head lowered, looking both haunted and a little hunted. He thought for a moment, then shifted forward in his chair and leaned toward the microphone.
“If my son is watching, I just want him to know Daddy’s okay,” Kellaway said.
The assembled crowd responded with a soft cooing sound that made Lanternglass think of pigeons.
“He’s not that good a guy,” Dorothy announced.
“He stopped a crazy person with a gun.”
“But he also goes to SeaWorld,” Dorothy said, and pointed at his sweatshirt. “They keep orcas prisoner in little, little tanks. Like if someone stuck you in a closet and made you stay there all day. No one should go to SeaWorld.”
“Yeah,” Jay Rickles said gently, almost quivering with pleasure. “Daddy’s okay. Daddy’s okay, folks. Daddy’s just fine.”
A final spasm of furious camera flashes filled the room. In their stammering, almost blinding light, Kellaway’s very pale skin had a blue sheen, like gunmetal.
9:18 P.M.
They were still out there, the news vans, the camera crews, choking the street in front of his house. He sat on the ottoman in the middle of his living room, with the landline in his lap. The police had taken his cell phone. He could see the broadcast vans through a gap in the drapes pulled across the big picture window. CNN. Fox. His TV was on, the only light in the room, the volume turned off. They were playing that same clip of Jay Rickles saying his thing about the bad guy with a gun meeting the good guy with a gun.
Kellaway felt like a bullet in a gun himself, felt charged and ready to go off, to fly toward some final, forceful impact. Loaded with the potential to blow a hole in what everyone thought they knew about him. When a gun went off, everyone turned their heads to look, and they would look at him now, too. At him instead of past him or through him.
He expected the phone to ring, and it did. He lifted the receiver to his ear.
Holly’s voice was breathless and small. “You’re home. I wasn’t sure you’d be home. I was just watching you on TV.”
“They recorded that hours ago. You’re just seeing it now?”
“Y-yes. Just seeing it now. You’re all right? You aren’t hurt?”
“No, love,” he said to his wife. Still his wife, even now. On paper anyway.
A little indrawn breath. “You shouldn’t call me that.”
“Love?”
“Yes. You shouldn’t even think it.”
“I would’ve been thinking it if she killed me. If she shot me today, it would’ve been my last thought.”
Another shuddering breath. She was trying not to cry. She cried so easily: at the ends of TV movies about Christmas, at ASPCA commercials, when movie
stars died. She was always clothed in the sheer velvet gown of her emotions, the fabric of it rippling with every step into the world she took, clinging to her wherever she went.
“You shouldn’t of gone in there. You should’ve waited for the police. What if she shot you? Your son needs a father,” she told him.
“Your lawyer didn’t seem to think he does. Your lawyer thought it would be just fine if I only saw George once a month, with a chaperone there to spy on me.”
She took a sniffling breath, and he knew for sure she was crying now. It was several seconds before she could speak again, and then her voice was frail with emotion. “My lawyer didn’t just push you around. She pushed me around, too. She threatened to quit if I tried to negotiate with you. She made me feel so stupid when I told her I knew you’d never hurt us, that you’d never—”
Holly’s sister squawked in the background, a harsh, unintelligible sound that reminded him of the adults talking in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Holly didn’t know how to stand up for herself. The expectations of other people were like a blasting gale and Holly just a sheet of newspaper, flapping this way and that under their influence. It was Rand Kellaway’s opinion that Holly’s sister Frances was a closet lesbian and that the man she was married to was, in all likelihood, a queer. The dude wore bright shirts in suspicious colors (tangerine, teal) and enthusiastically watched figure skating on television.
“What’s Frances saying to you?” Kellaway asked. He felt something flare inside of him, like a stroked match hissing into flame.
But Holly wasn’t listening to him anymore, she was listening to her sister. Holly said, “Yes.” More squawking. “No!” And then again, “No!” in a pleading, whining tone.
“Tell her to mind her own business,” Kellaway said. He could feel Holly slipping away, out of reach, and it maddened him. “Don’t listen to her. Whatever she’s saying doesn’t matter.”
Holly turned her attention back to him, but her voice was flustered, hitching with emotion. “G-George wants to speak with you, Rand. I’m going to put him on. Fran says I can’t talk to you anymore.”